Case Study : Christy Sports

Client
Established in 1958, Christy Sports is currently the largest specialty ski and snowboard retailer and snowsport service specialist in the Rocky Mountain region. They have 42 retail locations across Colorado and Utah. While they are a sporting goods retailer, by design they are not a retailer of all sporting goods. Skiing, snowboarding, snow-shoeing, mountain biking, and outdoor furniture are their areas of specialty in the outdoor sports industry. They are proud of their specialty recognition with quality products and knowledgeable service at convenient locations; and they are committed to outstanding customer service, far beyond the customer's expectations; and to providing the best products, and the most knowledgeable staff in order to promote lasting customer loyalty and trust.

Challenge
Christy Sports had an existing e-commerce website that was several years old, but suffered from the following:

• Outdated look & feel
• Low order volume
• Difficult to navigate
  Customers had a difficult time finding specific items.
• Difficult to update
  It was difficult and time consuming to internally update the product offerings, sales promotions, etc.
• Inefficient fulfillment process
  Fulfilling orders was a resource intensive process requiring manual order-entry in multiple systems, such as UPS and their inventory and POS systems.
• Inventory management errors
  Inventory was managed manually causing discrepancies between quantities in the system and physical quantities on-hand, resulting in many confirmed orders that could not actually be fulfilled.

Solution
Christy Sports looked to XploreNet to help them implement a new and improved e-commerce solution. From the beginning, XploreNet realized the project scope was large, however at the time the project began there were only a few months until the peak selling season started. So XploreNet recommended that the project be divided into four phases.

• Phase 1: Main E-Commerce Website/Customer Interface
• Phase 2: Market Segment Specific E-Commerce Websites
• Phase 3: Fulfillment & Inventory Management Integration
• Phase 4: Customer Interface Enhancements (Work-In-Progress)

This phased-approach allowed for a new e-commerce website to be up in time for the peak season in order to realize an improvement in online sales over the previous year.

Phase 1: Main E-Commerce Website/Customer Interface
Since the most important aspect of the website would be the customer interface, the first phase entailed working with Christy Sports to redevelop the main e-commerce website (www.store.christysports.com). XploreNet basically started with a clean slate. After several very detailed requirements meetings development began. With literally thousands of products to be sold online the customer interface and ease-of-use was a primary concern. To enable customers to easily locate the correct products a new three-level navigation system was developed that allowed users to easily drill down to specific products from any place on the site. Additionally a product search and brand search was added allowing customers to search for any product by name, description or brand.

XploreNet also wanted to ensure the new website was developed so that it would index well with search engines and capture prospective customers that might not know to directly visit christysports.com. For this XploreNet employed techniques such as friendly-URLs and customized controlled meta tags throughout the site.

Phase 2: Market Segment Specific E-Commerce Websites
After the main e-commerce website was launched, several additional websites were desired and subsequently developed to focus on specific market segments, such as the following domains:

• www.alpinewarehouse.com (specific for closeout items)
• www.powdertools.com (targeted snowboarders specifically)
• www.powderdivas.com (targeted women specifically).

While these websites appear to be completely different websites externally, they were developed to be driven by the same back-end, product management database. The same code base was used, so if any major changes were needed such as tax calculations or other shopping cart logic, the change only has to be made once from a programming standpoint, as opposed to duplicating the change for each domain. Christy Sports benefited from this with not only better quality-control on the websites, but it reduced future enhancement costs, which XploreNet knew there would be, some of which extensive.

Phase 3: Fulfillment & Inventory Management Integration
The third phase entailed improvements that were literally invisible to the customer, but benefited them with faster, more accurate order fulfillment. At the time the phase began fulfillment was still a resource intensive, manual and duplicative process. If Christy Sports' ability to continue to grow their online sales at the pace phase 1 & 2 had set while maintaining profit margins, the integration and semi-automation of the fulfillment process was needed.

XploreNet integrated their inventory, ordering and UPS shipping systems. The products featured in the online store are now tied directly to the inventory system. Today Christy Sports no longer worries about confirming an online order for a product that is out-of-stock. Previously this was done manually, but with thousands of products in 42 stores there were numerous errors. Now as soon as a product is out-of-stock, per the new fulfillment system, it is removed from the online store.

After extensive analysis XploreNet and Christy Sports collaborated to create requirements/steps for the new fulfillment system which are summarized below:

• Step 1: Product Identification
  Once an order is placed, the website notifies the fulfillment center of every store/warehouse in the system that has the item in stock and an employee simply indicates on the website from where the product should be pulled. This action initiates a notification that is sent to the respective store (if necessary) to forward the product to the appropriate warehouse.
• Step 2: Product Sort
  At each warehouse, all arriving products are scanned via bar code scanner. Upon being scanned, the website identifies the customer order associated with the product. As shipments arrive from different stores, for orders that include multiple products, each product is placed in a numbered bin to which the automated website tracks on the order. Once all products corresponding to an order have arrived the bin numbers of all products are listed on the order.
• Step 3: Packaging
  An employee gathers the products of an order from their respective, assigned bins and sends them to a packing station. All products are scanned to verify that the order is complete. It then is packaged in a box, a packaging slip is created and it is sent to the shipping station.
• Step 4: Shipping
  At the shipping station an employee enters the order ID# and the system interfaces with UPS to alert them of the order and then prints a shipping label using a UPS thermal printer. The label is affixed to the package, which is sealed and placed on the loading dock to await pick-up.
• Step 5: Daily Reconciliation
  At the end of each business day the website automatically uploads all daily orders into the company's inventory system in a standardized format. Once all updates from all stores are completed, a compiled update is downloaded into the inventory system adjusting all inventory levels and product availability.

Note: There are dozens of additional features that are also included to help manage various situations ranging from searching in the system for missing items, to dealing with incorrect inventory counts from stores, to allowing employees to adjust prices when necessary, to managing returns and credit card refunds, just to name a few.

Phase 4: Customer Interface Enhancements (Work-In-Progress)
XploreNet has just started the fourth phase, which will focus on enhancing the customer experience on the website by adding new features, dynamic user content and better account management.

Significance
Each phase of this project returned significant results for Christy Sports.

Phase 1:
By getting a first phase up quickly XploreNet was able to provide an improved customer interface and subsequently and improved experience-all by the start of the peak selling season, which resulted in an over 100% increase in online sales from the previous year.

Phase 2:
Even before the peak selling season was completed XploreNet began work on the development of the second phase. The additional websites allowed Christy Sports to focus on specific segments both in marketing and sales.

Phase 3:
Results from phases 1 & 2 exceeded Christy Sports' expectations. They realized they would not be able to keep up with orders in the next ski season unless improvements were made to the fulfillment process. Phase 3 has resulted in significant time and cost savings associated with their fulfillment process. While Christy Sports has not quantified these saving specifically, the savings have more than surpassed the development costs for this phase.

Tasks that use to take an employee most of the day are now completed in a fraction of a second with few clicks of a mouse on the website. Other tasks like locating inventory and relating it to specific orders used to take hours and now takes minutes.

Like most successful companies, Christy Sports realizes the website is never complete. As their business needs change and the business grows each year, so does their web site.